Reviews of MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, and Constant Contact

I have been using MailChimp and I found it the best choice for Newsletter and building email templates.

The only annoying part as a developer is when I started using their API through mandrill, The API itself work perfect, but the issue is in the templates.

I start by creating a template in Mailchimp then submit it to mandrill (this gives me the impression that API is a second citizen in mailchimp, but not a big deal, it works) then I update the template code through Mandrill and here start the problem because you loose the Sync between MailChimp and Mandrill. Mandrill has a very poor template editor and you can't Sync it back to MailChimp to use their greate template editor.

Everything else is great.

Ease of Use
Documentation
Reliability
Support

How developers use MailChimp vs Campaign Monitor vs Constant Contact

So many features. Before deciding on MailChimp, I did a bunch of research on the other options. MailChimp blows the other services out of the water when it comes to features.

I was pretty pissed once we had to start paying because it was (at the time) more than we were paying for hosting which is pretty ridiculous. Then I started playing with some of the transactional services and started going through the motions of recreating all the little stuff MailChimp has. Four hours later, realized it wasn't worth it.

With that said, the cost is still pretty steep when put in the context of our total tool/service spend so we’ll be using Mandrill for everything pretty soon, we already use it for Transactional Emails. Pro Tip: use the two-factor auth app Alter-Ego and you get 10% off your MailChimp bill, every month. Security FTW.

Campaign Monitor handles the subscriber lists as well as all the transactional emails (the signup welcome email, and the course purchase thank you email). Emails are tracked and edited directly in Campaign Monitor without needing to modify the Rails application, and allow non-tech admins to check email deliveries and reattempt emails.